too much blood on my hands for a girl like you
by Ninjee
Summary: "She swings in on a chain to save him. He thinks she deserves more than just the bronze." (or the one where the ninth doctor has just about had enough of all the guilt and pain of losing his planet until he meets a fantastic shop girl who saves him in ways she can never even realize.)


The TARDIS chimes in his mind. He listens passively as she hums her disapproval.

He has been in the zero room for weeks, or perhaps hours, or perhaps days. That's the fantastic thing about the zero room - he can't feel the time passing, can't hear it ticking away. Just him. No thought, no nothing. Simple, passive existence.

He crawled in here ages ago, eighth body shaking and crying and convulsing and somehow, at the same time, numb. His thick curls are gone, now, replaced with barely any hair at all, and the velvet coat that he used to be so very fond of is ripped over his new shoulders, ruined - his back too broad for it, after regeneration.

There was something that happened in between, perhaps? But no. No, there couldn't have been. He knows time to the second, after all, and there is none missing. The Eighth fought the war. The Eighth flipped the switch and made the decision. And the Eighth died.

This is his ninth body. He is completely certain.

He's clutching poor old Eight's fob watch in his hand. For a moment, he considers the chameleon arch, wonders if this body is the cowardly sort, wonders at how easy it would be. Must be nice, to be able to vanish. To not be the last of a race but instead to simply be another in a faceless crowd of humans.

The walls of the zero room shook, wildly, and he dropped the watch.

"Wouldn't really do it." he muttered. "Bloody coward, me."

He sounded northern. First time he'd heard this new voice.

The walls shook again, irritated.

"Are you trying to tell me not to mope?" he asked, incredulous. "This isn't like losing one person. This isn't like losing a _dozen_ people! This is a planet, a whole _planet_, and it's _mine_!"

The shaking dulled to a wobble, like someone trying to shake you awake.

"Leave me alone." he mumbled.

_Do not act like a child. _she scolds, brushing against his mind.

"The Time Lords are _dead!" _he shouts, feels it echo in the zero room. It's been two weeks, or two months, or two years, two _somethings _and he hasn't shed a single tear. "They're dead and it's my fault!"

The zero gravity in the room shuts off and he crashes to the ground. The message is clear - leave. You are acting like a child who broke a toy. Go and do something.

_Bloody sentient timeships,_ he thinks. _Can't leave well enough alone._

He slinks to the library and doesn't think he'll leave there, either. He opens a book. The words swim and his eyes refuse them.

The TARDIS shakes with a deep sigh.

* * *

Slowly, he starts to wander.

He thinks of food two days after he leaves the zero room and finds that the kitchen has cautiously moved next door to the library. He raps his knuckles to the wall in thanks, exhausted.

He eats half a pear before realizing what he's done and spits it out violently, spinning around to reach for water.

Eight's velvet coat rips even further as he does so. Feeling defeated, he snatches a banana off the shelf and goes back to the library.

_Dickens, _he thinks, wildly, desperate for some type of normal, some reason not to think. Dickens has never swum in front of his eyes. His are the only books on the shelf that he can read the titles of - _I'll read Dickens._

The banana is good. It surprises him somehow, that things can still be good.

* * *

Three days later, the coat rips entirely in half and and the sleeves hang from his wrists. He heads to the wardrobe room, passes Three's cape and Four's scarf and Six's colorful coat, and snatches trousers and a jumper and a leather jacket. When he puts them on, something settles.

The new clothes feel like armor.

* * *

He stays in the library for a time, leaving for food every few days. He reads Dickens and Shakespeare and a dozen others. He writes his own histories into the margins of history books, counting forwards - Susan leaving, and Adric wiping out the dinosaurs, and Sarah Jane and the mummies, all the way up to San Francisco and Grace Halloway.

Finally, he finds a history in the back labeled _Gallifrey._

The other books blur in his mind as he carefully adds a page to the end of the book.

His hand trembles when he writes the word _extinct_. But he manages.

His hearts are heavy when he replaces the book on the shelf. He thinks briefly of Grace again, of Sarah, of Adric, of his Susan, of all those that have traveled with him and how he is not worthy of them anymore.

Susan. All of them.

"Gone now." he says aloud into the still of the library. It echoes, bouncing back at him through empty bookshelves.

He wonders what the other hims would have done. He feels, suddenly, very old.

He doesn't know the quirks of this body yet. He knows his hands, his feet, but he hasn't seen the face yet. He doesn't know if he wants to, really.

The TARDIS makes a sad sort of trilling noise.

"Tired, old girl?" he asks her softly. "We'd better land, then."

They've been in the Vortex for Rassilon knows how long and she lands him in a weapons factory where they are doing human testing. To this day he wonders if it was really an accident.

He shuts it down. Saves people, who thank him over and over and over. It feels good, helping. People are alive, now, because of him. It's much better, he thinks, than them being dead.

He goes ten years into the future and they have planted a banana grove there.

He takes one. He _does_ like bananas.

* * *

"Where to next, then?" he asks her, feeling better, and it feels out of place when her confident humming sparks a smile. He still doesn't know what this new face looks like. He shaves when he needs to without looking in mirrors, and the leather and jumper are practical - he doesn't pay attention to them, much.

This body was born in fire and blood and sometimes the anger in it, the rawness, it terrifies him. He thinks back to his kind, mild eighth self - the wrong kind of man for a war.

So much joy in that body. So much happiness. He'd loved a bit, in that body. He thinks of Grace Halloway and her opera music and the shoes that fit perfectly and he presses his palms into his eyes. Perhaps it was fitting, that that joy and that love should end with a war.

The TARDIS hums at him and he breaks out of his thoughts.

He's landed at the work sort of planet this time - primitive and unknowing of things that are different. When he steps out of the woods, a few children with purple-blue blood and blue-tinted skin scream and scatter, looking at the tint of _his_ skin and screaming the word _monster._

He thinks that they are right, which scares him a right bit more than any regeneration's anger could.

The TARDIS leaves him alone and he stares at his hands - trying to connect their warm roughness with the bloodstains he knows are there somewhere. He turns them over, checks the palms, fingers, wrists, and they're all clean - but he sees the blood wherever he looks.

He tries not to look much, after that. He's seen enough of these hands for a lifetime.

* * *

His ship lands him in London next. There are Autons, and he goes into an empty shop with a bomb and thinks _maybe I won't come out._

The TARDIS is worried and he can tell, but maybe the bloodstains on his skin will go away with a new body. Maybe they will fade and he can forget and perhaps that is wrong, but he _wants_ to forget, and he thinks of the Chameleon Arch again, he wants to fade, he wants to go, he can't live with all the souls of Gallifrey in the corners of his eyes, he can't carry a planet on his shoulders anymore -

There is a girl in the shop's basement and she screams and he grabs her hand. Normal, really - there is always one human at the wrong place, wrong time.

But when she turns her head to look at him and he tells her to run, her eyes flash impossibly golden for a half second when they meet his, and for a moment all of Time and him and her and the universe is stretched out in her gaze.

It only lasts for a half second and then she is once more a terrified nineteen-year-old.

He leads her to the door and then pauses, looking back. He does not want it to end. For a moment it felt like he was not so covered up and held down by the things he'd done.

"I'm the Doctor, by the way, what's your name?"

"Rose." she says, eyes still doe-wide and scared.

"Nice to meet you, Rose." he tells her. "Run for your life!"

He doesn't know what it means, but something in those eyes gets his feet moving, gets him out of the building just before it explodes. He doesn't question it. It is one of life's happy little coincidences, the ones that even happen to people like him. The ones that happen rather often, really, when Time decides that someone is not done with their work yet, little things that people call miracles and he calls coincidences. Some whisper of Time to keep him going, some long-forgotten feeling in the girl's old soul.

_Bloody poetic,_ he thinks with a snort. _Is this who I am now?_

Nothing to do with the girl herself. She's unimportant, she's an outlet for energy, she is nothing in the grand scheme. Just a silly little human with her beans on toast and telly. She was just nearby and Time chose her.

Though why Time would want to _keep_ an old monster of a Time Lord is beyond his rather impressive knowledge.

* * *

He never expects to see her again - but then of course he does, the very next day.

He sees his new face for the first time in a mirror in her house. The nose and the ears - bloody _huge._ He's had worse, he supposes. The eyes are blue, not much hair, like he suspected.

He gets the arm and leaves, but Rose Tyler isn't finished with him yet.

"Doctor _what_? What do you mean?" she asks him, frustrated. For a moment he considers telling her some human name, some human story, but this body doesn't lie well when it doesn't involve saving people's skins.

"Just the Doctor." he tells her. He takes her hand to show her the turn of the Earth and half expects to feel the golden mist again, clouding at the corners of his eyes, but it doesn't appear. She is normal, he confirms it, something he already knew, blessedly normal.

"Now forget me, Rose Tyler." he says, gently. "And go home."

She is just a normal human being, he thinks, on the way back to the TARDIS, just a shop girl.

He is not disappointed in the least.

She is _brilliant._ He thinks he misses traveling. Humans and their impossible, fantastic brilliance. Shining like stars in their own right, flying in between planets.

He wonders if she would come with him, if he asked.

* * *

She is normal, incredibly normal, almost annoyingly average, but nothing about her annoys him, though he acts like it does, sometimes. It's the sort of body this one is - likes to keep people on their toes.

He finds her again after her boyfriend has been turned into plastic. She leaps into the TARDIS with him and cares more about the people that have been lost than her own personal confusion.

She finds the transmitter and the secret base and goes to comfort her boyfriend.

When he is tackled, held back by Autons, he hears her whisper "It's the end of the world," and he looks up at her. She stands, braver than he'd thought she could be, and framed in the spotlight they are shining on the TARDIS, she is lovely, like a goddess, like salvation.

She swings in on a chain to save him. He thinks she deserves more than just the bronze.

* * *

This is how it should go - Rose Tyler saves the Earth, he asks her to go with him, and she says yes, with her wide, lovely smile spreading across her face, tongue poking out at the side. They travel together for ages and then she comes home and lives out the rest of her days, happy at having seen the universe and having had a few adventures.

This is how it does go - Rose Tyler saves the universe, he asks her to go with him, and she shakes her head no with a sad, funny smile, her boyfriend Ricky (Mickey?) hanging onto her legs.

He shrugs and tries not to seem affected, but the prospect of years ahead without that cheerful smile is maddening. He has found that she distracts him. There is no blood when she is in the room.

When he gets back into the TARDIS, he can see blood on the walls, on his hands, his clothes. He sets to dematerialize and tries to go to another planet, but the old girl lands him again stubbornly, in the exact same place he'd come from.

_Heart,_ she insists. _Cub. Rose cub._

He is not sure that even she knows what that means.

_Go back._ she coaxes, and so he does.

"By the way, did I mention," he says hopefully, leaning out of the TARDIS, "that it also travels in time?"

She kisses Mickey-Ricky's cheek and runs inside.

THe TARDIS shudders with sudden delight, and Rose gives him a smile that makes the bloodstains peel off the walls, leaving them clean and coral-y and beautiful. He raps his knuckles on the console.

_She, she, she._ the TARDIS hums. _I like her. Rose cub._

Cub, he thinks, glancing over at Rose Tyler, in his TARDIS. Cub didn't seem to fit, exactly.

_Cub,_ the old girl insists. _My cub._

He rolls his eyes good-naturedly and turns back to Rose, who is staring around in awe.

"Where to, Rose Tyler?"

He does not think he will ever tire of it, saying that name.

* * *

This is how it ends up going: He travels the universe with Rose Tyler. She is brave and bright and sometimes he sees that old glow out of the corner of his eyes, like a hint, like a question. The words _Bad Wolf _appear everywhere, and a man named Jack Harkness joins them on the ship. Rose breaks up, for all intents and purposes, with Ricky-Mickey. He finds he likes the boy more after that.

Sometimes the blood comes back, but all he has to do is get her to smile at him, and it vanishes like it was never there.

He writes a bit more history into the books. They involve Rose Tyler, Savior of the Earth. The stories of her have never once swam in his vision - and even old Charlie boy does that, now, sometimes.

* * *

"I am the Bad Wolf. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space, a message to lead myself here."

Rose. Rose, Rose, Rose.

This is the gold. This is the Bad Wolf.

He has solved the mystery, but he doesn't know what to do next. The mystery never took too much of his attention. He wrote it off as coincidences because he didn't care, much, because she came first, Rose Tyler, human, shop girl, his salvation, the most important thing in the universe right now - not because she is golden, not because she is Time and it bends around her like a million possibilities, like Time Lord catnip. She is important because she is his. His pink and yellow human.

He should tell her that. Pink and yellow. She'd like it, she'd laugh.

Someday he will tell her, he thinks.

"My Doctor." she says. She is not smiling. There are tears on her cheeks.

Oh, he loves her. His Rose.

_No more,_ he thinks. _No more deaths on these hands._

Because his hands were bloodstained, but somehow, impossibly, she loved him anyway.

(He would learn in the future that Rose Tyler liked to take the definition of impossible and drop it firmly on its head.)

"I think you need a Doctor," he tells her, and good thing she's not really awake, because he would never live down a line like that.

Her lips are warm and blessedly soft. He wants to kiss her for the rest of his lives, but he doesn't, if only so he can get them into the Vortex before he regenerates.

Born in fire, he thinks, carrying her back into the TARDIS, leaving the ruin behind them. This body born in fire, born in death. And now I'll die.

S'not that bad, dying. Not if it's for her.

* * *

The TARDIS urges him to go to the zero room, but he insists that he'll wait for her to wake up. He wants her to see, he wants her to understand.

"Not with this daft old face," he says, and she shakes her head, and he wants her to realize, that this face is too old and this body too broken but he loves her, he _does,_ and he feels a shadow of the Eighth left, his joy, how _he_ would have loved Rose Tyler, wholly, with everything in the world he had, and he wants that for her.

This is a gift, he thinks, because she deserves a face less daft, a face less old. A set of hearts that will love her all her life.

A good man. He can be that man for her.

(Nine did turn out to be quite the softy.)

"You were fantastic." he tells her. She looks terrified, the way she did that first day in Henrik's, Autons on their heels. "And you know what?" She shakes her head, eyes wide, and she is lovely even in her fear.

"So was I." he says, beaming at her, ears too big and face too old (too old for her), leather and wool jumpers and practicality, and about to die.

There it is. Rose Tyler's smile.

It is the last thing he sees through old Nine's blue eyes.

_Rose cub._ The TARDIS sings. _Cub, my wolf, my cub, fear not. Our thief will live._

The last of her words swim out, but he thinks they are something like _forever _and _love,_ which, allowing him to be sappy a moment on his deathbed, are probably quite true.

* * *

_A/N: This will probably end up being a multi-chapter oneshot. One with Nine, one with Ten. Maybe one with Eleven. Or the Tardis. That'd be cool. Anyway, please review, and tell me if this is turning out good or if I'm wasting my time c:_

_~*~disclaimer wow~*~_

_xx Ninjee_


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